Quote:
Originally Posted by rhadin
Did you keep track of the time you spent writing, editing, marketing, fulfilling orders, designing, typesetting, and all the other facets of publishing a book? I ask because the numbers you give are impressive but without knowing how much time you spent and how much out-of-pocket you spent it is not possible to determine if you are getting a decent rate of return.
My wife is a painter and I keep telling her that it isn't good enough to record a sale; you need to know whether the return is worthwhile. If you spend 500 hours on a painting and marketing it and $1,000 on supplies including a frame, selling it for $10,000 (net $9,000) gets you $18 an hour in wages. That may be acceptable, but that is what you need to know, not that you sold it for $10,000. |
It also greatly depends upon your expectations. If you figured on creating something that you fully expect to make little or no money on, and you end up netting a small to decent amount, then that makes whatever investment worthwhile.
I'd argue that most people lurking around these forums are more on the fiction end of things, and it's (sadly) somewhat foolish to go into that market expecting to make money.
Just out of curiosity, is there an amount or percentage of books that you edit that end up selling well/getting picked up by a publisher?
Manuscript editing obviously requires a different frame of thought than newspaper or other types of editing; how did you go about getting into that sort of thing?